Why I am writing this blog

I have created this blog mainly for the purpose of keeping my family and friends informed on the progress of the house. Why? You may ask, why can’t they just come around and see the house? Well my partner is in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) and we have moved around a fair bit over the last couple of years. As such, we now have a lot of friends spread all over Australia, and all of our family is in other states. I therefore thought the creation of this blog would be a fun and visual way to keep our friends and family updated on the progress of our house, allowing them to visit us in the privacy of our own home, online, and share with us the frustrations of our failures and joys of our triumphs as we post them.

I have so many things going on at the moment, between work, study and general life, and the house is a major focus of ours at the moment. It most definitely diverts my attention away from study and catching up with friends, be it in person or over the phone (sorry guys!).  It is the main topic of all of our conversations, not only between my partner and myself, but it is almost the first thing anyone asks me these days, with: ‘how’s the house going?’ My answer: ‘slowly’. The reason the house is such a source of topic is that we are trying to do it all ourselves (DIY), and trying to get it done as quickly and cheaply as possible. The first day we officially owned the house we started gutting it, by the end of the day we had a full skip bin, had pulled up all of our carpets, most of the cupboards, and part of the kitchen. By the end of the first week, we had no kitchen, no cupboards, bare sub-flooring, and quite a lot of open walls, this was in June. We now have most of the floating floor in, most walls and ceilings painted, half of the kitchen and half of the toilet completed, and all of our walls up. Here you can see some photos of our bare walls and subflooring.

What was the kitchen

Hallway in progress with first gyprock sheet up

 Hopefully one day (in the near future? Here’s hoping) when we have finished renovating the house, we can look back at this blog and amaze ourselves at the transformation that we have brought about with our own hands, the amount of work we have done, and how much we have accomplished over such a short period of time.